The Cinematheque

In Person: Margaret Honda

“Honda’s films—often both camera-less and imageless—give vital life to the texture and grain and palpable experience of film as film, freed from the burden of representing and meaning more than the already profound surface.”

Haden Guest, Harvard Film Archive

Color Correction was made from the timing tapes for a conventional narrative film. It is a series of modifications—each corresponding to the length of a shot—without the images they are meant to modify. I was able to get a set of timing tapes for an unknown recent narrative feature. For my purposes, the tapes could have come from any other film of the same type and era. Such a film consists of numerous choices designed to achieve a predetermined vision. My ambition was different: to make a film by ceding all control over it. The overall length of the film, the 35mm gauge, and the colour changes had already been established and encoded in the tapes. I had no idea what the film would look like until it was completed, and I accept it as the tapes gave it to me. —Margaret Honda

Silent

Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive

Color Correction will be followed by a conversation between Margaret Honda and Jean-Philippe Antoine, professor emeritus of History and Theory of Contemporary Art at Paris 8 University.

“Color Correction is something of a folk epic, a compendium of variations on popular visual forms in their minimal presentation.”

Phil Coldiron, Cinema Scope

“A mesmerizing conceptual gambit.”

Nick Pinkerton, Artforum